One of the things that I often mention in my keynote presentations is the idea that it in the age of Google it is increasingly difficult to be the content area expert. Many of our students can be described as “Google jockeys.” They’re the students that Google everything they hear. While the habit can be a distraction, it can also be leveraged for good in your classroom.

I first discovered the term Google Jockey when I read Curtis Bonk’s The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. In The World Is Open I came across the idea for having a “Google Jockey” in my classroom. The idea is that you have one or two students in the room who are responsible for looking up terms or phrases that come up during the course of classroom discussion. Combining the use of a back channel along with a Google Jockey could become a good avenue for drilling deeper into the content of the day’s lesson.